Sally Breslin: My Life: WHEN "I DO" SHOULD HAVE BEEN "I DON'T!"

(Note: Names in this story have been changed to prevent irrevocable embarrassment – and the possible loss of several of my longtime friendships!)

Summer always reminds me of the wedding season, and the wedding season reminds me of how many of my friends’ weddings I attended back when I was in my early 20s.

So many of my friends got married between 1969 and 1970, I was attending a wedding a month back then. I could have furnished an entire house with all of the wedding gifts I bought.

Thinking back, I still wonder why some of the weddings even took place. I have a photo of my friend Maddy’s wedding, for example, where she and her groom are seated at the head table. She is staring off into space and smoking a cigarette, and he is leaning away from her, his eyes half-closed and his chin resting on his hand.

Had they been embalmed, they couldn’t have looked less enthusiastic.

And at my friend Linda’s wedding, when the priest said, “You may now kiss the bride,” Linda kept her arms straight down at her sides when her husband kissed her. Talk about passion.

But the wedding I felt was the most doomed to fail was my friend Joyce’s.

Joyce was a tall, 5’10” stunning blonde who had two goals in life: to find a man taller than she was…and to marry him.

I’ll never forget the day she called to tell me she’d finally met her Mr. Right.

“He’s really tall!” she said breathlessly. “I’m so happy I finally can wear high heels! And he’s a real hunk! We’re getting married in two months!”

I couldn’t wait to meet the guy who’d swept her off her feet so quickly, so I told her to bring him over the next night.

All I can say is I wasn’t prepared at all for what walked through my door. Joyce’s fiancé was, well, creepy…axe-murderer creepy.

She was right about him being tall. In fact, he had to duck his head to get through the doorway. But he weighed only about 130 pounds. His teeth were badly decayed, his face was covered with scars, and there were big white circles around his eyes where the skin, for some reason, had lost its pigment.

But his looks weren’t the problem. His personality, or lack thereof, was. The man didn’t talk. When I spoke to him, he didn’t answer. When Joyce spoke to him, he looked the other way and yawned.

As I was making coffee for the happy couple, Joyce’s fiancé suddenly stood and said to her, “I’m going out for a while. You stay here and I’ll be back for you later.” Then he left.

“Where is he going?” I asked Joyce as I heard the car pulling out of the driveway.

Color rose to her cheeks and she didn’t seem to want to answer. Finally, she said, “I don’t ask, and he doesn’t tell. All I know is he brings binoculars with him and goes out alone for a couple hours every night.”

I wanted to tell her to wake up – that her Mr. Right might actually be Mr. Peeping Tom, but on the off chance he was a birdwatcher who was going out to spy on owls, I kept my mouth shut.

Joyce asked me to be her maid of honor, her only attendant. The wedding was going to be a small one, she said, barely 20 people.

“Of course I’ll be your maid of honor,” I said smiling, all the while wondering if her fiancé would be in jail before the wedding day arrived.

The morning of the wedding, Joyce and I went to have our hair done. She was so excited to be marrying a tall man, she had her hair styled in an elaborate up-do that rose about eight inches from her head.

From there, we went to pick up the wedding cake at a nearby bakery. The first thing I noticed about the cake was that it had little black specks all over the white frosting…and the specks were moving.

“There are bugs all over the cake!” I whispered to Joyce.

“Well, it’s too late now to have another cake made,” she whispered back through gritted teeth. “So just don’t say anything and no one will know the difference! They’ll just think they’re sprinkles.”

Sprinkles with legs? It was enough to make me, the world’s biggest dessert lover, swear off cake for life.

The wedding day was incredibly hot. My hair drooped, my deodorant wore off and my feet swelled. By the time I walked down the aisle, I looked as if I’d been dunked in a vat of oil.

Joyce, however, was stunning in her lace gown and veil, and smiled brightly as she walked into the awaiting arms of Mr. Peeping Tom.

When the reverend asked if anyone could find reason for the couple not to be married, I had to bite my tongue to keep silent.

And later, at the quiet (a.k.a. incredibly boring) reception in the church basement, when Joyce asked her darling new husband how he thought she looked in her wedding gown, he shrugged and said, “Fat.”

I had to suppress the urge to slug him.

Instead, I offered him a second piece of wedding cake. 😊

Their marriage lasted barely a year, which really surprised me. I honestly hadn’t expected it to last that long.

Fortunately, Joyce didn’t let her bitter divorce, or her ex-husband’s arrest for felony voyeurism, discourage her from still trying to find Mr. Right.

Last I heard, she was on her fifth husband...and he is only 5’6”.

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